With the advent of the internet, websites have become one of the most popular means for individuals and organizations to help them reach their customers.

If you're building your very own Website it will really serve you in the long run to pay special attention to Website design from the outset. Sure you can go back and fix things at a later date, but a lot of damage can already have been done to your online credibility by that point - and that credibility may take a very long time to build back up again, so why take the risk?

You have decided to hire a professional to do your web design. The problem is that not all of them are professional. Some are working with knowledge that is out of date, and some of them are working out of the basement that belongs to their parents!

What you need to know:

Most people change their website's pages whenever they get a new idea. They think that each change is going to improve their site and make them more successful.

Of course, there are basic improvements you can make as you are writing the content for your site. And for the first few weeks you may notice some shortcomings that need to be remedied.

But, after a few days or weeks your site becomes stable. You don't find any more errors in spelling or grammar. The graphics look like they belong on the site. And your order link or opt-in form performs correctly.

You're now ready for split testing. This is a slow, incremental improvement of your site through ongoing testing.

Many amateur web designers marvel at the skills of other designers without realizing that there are some simple tricks for creating great looking web sites.

HTML is not a friendly language for laying out text and graphics. The advent of Cascading Style Sheets improved this, but a simple solution to the problem of layout is to use tables without borders. Within HTML, this can be done by adding the attribute BORDER="0" to the TABLE tag. However, most HTML editors, such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, allow you to set the border to 0 as one of the properties of the table.

Perhaps the biggest problem newcomers face is in finding appropriate images that look good. In many cases, images are found using a simple Google image search. More often that not, these images will be under copyright and using them risks potential legal action. One way around this is to purchase royalty-free images on CD / DVD or directly from the Web. Of course, you need to be careful to check the license agreement. For example, the images may only be royalty-free for non-commercial uses. Another solution is to take your own images using a digital camera (or scanning in your own photos). Again, to minimize the risk of legal action you should obtain permission from people shown in the photos before placing them on the web.

Have you surfed real estate sites lately? Many still make some fundamental mistakes that tend to drive visitors away, rather than offering a rich experience that people will return to.

A visitor who has come back to your site several times is well on his way toward picking up the phone or sending an email, and beginning a business friendship with you.

Have you ever thought of having your own website?

The Internet has become a platform, a virtual soapbox for anyone with an opinion or an interest to be able to share that with the rest of the world. The chances are high that you're reading this very article over the Internet.

Today, getting a website onto the Internet is as easy as point-and-click. No longer do you have to know all the laborious HTML code that you needed to know only a few short years ago.

You don't even have to know ftp protocols or how to design a site. Most website hosting companies now provide templates of websites that you can customize with your own links, and content, as easily as you would adjust or edit a letter in your word processor.

Several surveys have confirmed that the main growth in the use of the Internet is in the area of "networking". Whether that's using the Internet to route telephone calls, or the use of web sites to discuss things with like-minded people, there is little doubt that "connecting people" is a significant part of the Internet.

Until recently, the only way of being connected was via email. That is mostly one-to-one, has inherent delays and is also limited in what you can achieve. Nowadays, you can share text, audio and video using social networking sites. These are not one-to-one, but many-to-many and are also immediate. That has significant appeal for many Internet users.

What do you need to create a maintainable, scalable website quickly? Perhaps not as much as you think. Let's go through the list of website requirements and some suggestions.

First, you will need a domain name. Decide on a top-level domain ("com", "net", "org", etc.), go to a a domain-name registrar like "godaddy.com" or "networksolutions.com" and start entering domain names you might be interested in purchasing.

If you have a unique brand or company name, your choice should be easy because it is not very likely that anyone else has already bought your domain name. If you want a domain name like "cheapcomputers.com", on the other hand, you will have a more difficult time. Most of the easy domain names have been taken, but you should still be able to come up with a good one based on your registrar's suggestions and by using a bit of creativity.

While you should design your website to be aesthetically pleasing, beautiful graphics and clever little details are no substitute for a good navigation system. No matter how great your website looks, it will be useless if your visitor can't find their way around your site.

Traditionally the navigation menu is placed just below the header area or on the left hand side of the web page. Usability studies have shown that web site visitors instinctively look in these areas first.

Wherever you decide to place your navigation menu, remember that consistency is important. The most important thing is to place your navigation menu in the same spot on every one of your web pages. If you use an image to represent a navigational button, use the same image and the same color for that image on each page of your website. For example, if you use an image of a green house in the left hand corner of your web page as your "Home" navigational link, use the same green house image in the left hand corner of every one of your web pages to designate the "Home" link.